Road to Wellness: Introduction

How well did you sleep last night? Not great? What about your day? Were you cooped up, glued to your computer or smartphone? Did you throw down some fast food for lunch? If so, you’re not alone. Consider these sobering health and wellness statistics — The Wellness Council of America¹ reports that the typical American:

Gets a poor night’s sleep
Eats one or more meals outside the home daily
Receives 50 to 100 emails and countless text messages each day
Is considered either overweight or obese
Consumes his or her body weight in refined sugar each year
Spends 95 percent of the day indoors

I don’t know about you, but I find this really depressing. I like to think I have better habits than the typical American, but if I am being honest with myself, most of my days are spent at the office sitting, reading between 50 and 100 emails/text messages a day, and my latest Pinterest binge has trumped my plans to get to bed at a reasonable hour.

The good news is I have the power to change this — in fact, we all do. By re-examining our priorities we can achieve better balance in our lives. To help you (and ourselves), the IBX wellness team is putting together a series of health and wellness tips and exercises as inspired by the Wellness Council of America’s (WELCOA) book titled Road to Wellness. This Road to Wellness blog series can help you create a blueprint for optimal wellness by setting small, attainable goals. The start of a new year is the perfect time to take control of your life and live a healthy, well-balanced life.

The Four Areas of Wellness

To kick off your wellness journey, let’s establish the four areas of your well-being that need to be nurtured in order for you to thrive and feel whole again:

Physical
Spiritual
Mental
Emotional

Optimal wellness occurs when there is balance and harmony between all four of these areas. If one of these areas is neglected, your overall well-being will suffer. You could be in great shape physically but if your spiritual or emotional well-being is lacking, your life will feel unstable.

Road to Wellness Series

Each blog post of this series will focus on one of these four areas of well-being and give you tips for re-balancing this area of your life. It will help you identify “wellness robbers” that are depriving you of balance, teach you why it’s so important to create healthy boundaries and goals, and get you started on creating a personal blueprint for better wellness. By the end of the series, we hope you’ll have a renewed sense of self and feel whole again.

Next up in the blog series: The Road to Wellness: Creating Healthy Boundaries